Sarah Heringer Is Showing Cincinnati and the State of Ohio Bureaucratic Nihilism in Action

How a Cincinnati widow's grief exposes the fatal inertia of a system no longer governed by law, but by fear, power, and procedural decay.

Sarah Heringer’s two recent statements following the murder of her husband, Patrick, should shake every American out of complacency. They are not simply testimonies of grief or calls for reform. They are forensic autopsies of a state that no longer governs in any meaningful sense of the word. The system failed, yes—but what these posts reveal is that it failed as designed.

Let's be precise: what Heringer exposes is not a lack of laws, protocols, or procedures. It is their abundance. The killer, a known violent felon, removed his ankle monitor and vanished. Local police were never notified. The parole board insists they did everything “by the book.” And therein lies the horror: the book is bullshit. The system doesn't need reform; it needs naming for what it is—a husk of legitimacy animated only by inertia, fear, and deflection.

This is not a malfunction. It is bureaucratic nihilism: the belief, often unspoken but deeply embedded, that process is more important than outcome, that authority is more important than responsibility, and that appearances of order are preferable to actual justice. When the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction says, “All existing policies were followed,” they are confessing to the core truth of the modern American state: it exists to follow its own scripts, not to protect human beings.

The absurdity is terminal. Heringer rightly asks: if the system worked, why is it being changed? If law enforcement was notified, why weren’t they aware? If warrants were filed, why was no one looking? The answers don’t matter to the bureaucrats. What matters is that someone filled out the right form. This is the state not as protector, but as performance art.

And yet, in their incoherence, these institutions reveal the truth: they no longer operate under the pretense of law. Law requires coherence, clarity, and enforceable norms. What we are witnessing instead is power—pure, disoriented, unaccountable. The parole board isn’t accountable to the police. The police aren’t accountable to the mayor. The mayor isn’t accountable to victims. And no one is accountable to the truth.

What remains is a performative regime. Its function is not to govern, but to shield itself from responsibility, using opaque procedures as camouflage. This is what I have referred to repeatedly, based on political theory and comparative analysis, as a legitimacy vacuum. Not a conspiracy. Not a plot. A vacuum.

For your own grasp of the situation, here is the scoop by journalist Cassy Arsenault, from Instagram:

Then:

Full statement by ODRC:

When people like Sarah Heringer demand answers and receive only platitudes, this is not a bug. It is the protocol. What she encounters is not the state resisting accountability—it is the state as resistance to accountability. It is an obstructive state: one complicit in crime.

But here’s the real signal beneath the noise: the legitimacy vacuum creates space. And when that space is filled by citizens like Sarah Heringer, like others who are documenting, organizing, demanding receipts, people like me and my friends and supporters in Northern Kentucky—the monopoly on power fractures. Because power divorced from responsibility is unsustainable. It is exposed, slowly but surely, as a bluff.

So we must call this what it is: not just moral failure, not just policy failure, but state forfeiture. The refusal to notify police of a parole violation that ends in murder is not a glitch. It is the quiet end of the pretense that we live under a functioning rule of law.

The only thing left to do is what Sarah Heringer is doing—and what many of us are doing: replace it. Not with fantasy, not with rebellion, but with reality. Document the incoherence and show what it actually is. Show your receipts. Expose the bluff. And then build something that works.

Because the state, in its current form, has told us exactly what it is. And it is too late to pretend otherwise: the people must return truth to the frontline of our civil institutions. More people will die if we do not.